Thursday, August 31, 2017

Back when the True Elves ran things, the world was both bigger and closer together.

They had grabbed Space, bundled it up, and bound it into knots. Everything was near everything else, and distance was as meaningless as maps. They rarely bothered to learn where something was, since everything was just on the other side of the Door.

The Door was everywhere. They called it the Gem of All-Facing. They compared it to a box with infinite sides, and no interior. It connected the distant corners. It made everything adjacent. Its doors were everywhere, with forms as varied as their destinations.

They called it the Door, but the doors were just its skin. It's body was a lamellar labyrinth of hypertoroidal tissues, a universal linkage. It's handlers could whistle and it would arrive, inserting itself as a local door.

It is rumored that they originally grew it from a blink dog.

When the Time of Fire and Madness came, the Door was fractured. The knots were pulled, tightened, and torn. Trillions of gallons of unseen blood boiled off into the Nowhere. Skeins of odochrysm froze like ice on the surface of dead highways.

You can still see artifacts of that trauma all around the world, if you know where to look.

The doors in Old Clavenhorn all slightly shifted, torsioned within their frames, some bearing more sever scarring, such as midline offset (evidence of pandemic truncation of the Door's n-forks).

The road between Asria and Trystero is thirty miles longer in the northward direction than it is in the southward. (And dogs always shiver when they walk south along it.)

And near Meltheria, there is the Enigma, the most enduring blasphemy against natural law. Mages speculate that it was not the Door's heart, but perhaps it was where it first started to die.

A few fragments still remain intact, such as the nineteen windows in the palace of the Cerulean Slave-Kings. Each one looks out on a different sea, and each one incurs a different type of insanity in anyone who passes through it.

Many other doors, we destroyed because of the danger they posed. The spaces between the doors had grown strange. Without the care and support of the True Elves, parts of the Door became carnivorous, and then cancerous. They survived by feeding on themselves. (Because while the outer world burned, what else was there to eat?) Nested hallways, digesting themselves. Negative space eroding and reconstituting through stolen architecture. A war of cancers, empty places eating each other to death.

Parts of the Door are predatory, escaping the confines of their metastatic dimension and hunting through ours. But always the old blood reasserts itself, always the schema of the hound.

If they have a point of origin, it is rumored to be a place called Tindalos.

from Full Metal Alchemist

Wizards of the Door

It is wrong to treat the Door as if it is a monolith. It is a system perverted against itself, exactly like a human who is suffering from cancer.

Parts have gone rogue, and they have bitten at the heart of the superstructure. But the superstructure remains--it must--and it remembers its duties.

These are the parts of the Door that the Wizards serve.

To become a Door Wizard, go mess around with portals and extradimensional spaces. Alternatively, seek the elves (the only remaining practitioners of the teleport spell).

You must never imprison a living creature, or allow one to be imprisoned.

You must never harm a door, or allow one to be harmed.

Boons

You begin the game with a skeleton key. It unlocks the keyhole on your chest. If unlocked, your chest can be safely opened and your heart removed. This doesn't harm you, but you must obey any creature that holds your heart.

You can cast a version of the knock spell that involves pushing your skeleton key into a creatures sternum (requires a successful attack roll). The creature takes [sum] damage on a successful save, and dies on a failed save (as most creatures die when you messily open their rib cage). (This requires you to cast the knock spell normally, by memorizing it from your spellbook.)

The room created by your secret room spell becomes enlargable and decorateable. Each dungeon key you feed it creates a new 400 sq. ft. room shaped however you wish that holds up to two pieces of furniture and/or decoration. The created room, furniture, and decorations all match the style of the dungeon that generated the key. (Only keys found in dungeons have this ability.) At the DM's discretion, very important keys may generate NPCs within the secret room.

GLOG Wizard Rules: Players begin with two spells from this list generated by rolling d6. When they research a new spell, they roll a d12. Spells #13 and #14 are rare spells, and are as rare as magic weapons in your game.

Knock

Lock

Map

Secret Room

Speak With Lock

Emergency Exit

Command Door

Summon Door Hound

Wall of Doors

Secret Chest

Transpose

All Things Adjacent

Rare Spells

13. Portal

14. Teleport

Spells

All Things Adjacent
R: 0
T: self
D: 1 turn

You are adjacent to all things within your line of sight. You can punch anything you could see. You can pick up any object and put it in your pocket as if it were beside you. However, you are affected as if you were in every location at once. (To put it in grid-based combat terms, you are affected by all effects effecting every observable square.) You do not suffer multiple effects from the same hazard (even though you are standing in all parts of a wall of fire, you only take its damage once). Obviously, casting this spell within sight of the sun is instantly fatal.

If you control multiple doors within the same dungeon, you can cast this spell while investing 3 dice to link them together for 10 minutes. Whatever enters one door exits the other. You can decide which side of which door leads to which side of which door.

Emergency Exit
R: touch
T: [sum] objects
D: 0

Up to [sum] touched objects and/or creatures are teleported out of the dungeon. They arrive safely, but are all scattered within 1 mile of the dungeon's primary entrance. Each carried item has an independent 5% chance to be similarly scattered.

If used in a building, it will eject all objects and/or creatures from random entrances (each rolled separately).

If used in a city's streets, it will eject all objects and/or creatures from random entrances (each rolled separately).

Lock
R: 50'
T: object
D: 10 minutes
splittable
Non-living object closes and becomes locked. If the object is a door, chest, or similar object, it will slam shut, dealing [sum] damage to any creature passing through it and then trapping them. This spell works on things that aren't technically portals (for example, a sword could be locked in its scabbard). When resisting being opened, the object has an effective Strength of 10 + ([dice] * 4).

Alternatively, this spell can be cast on a creature's orifice, or paired orifices; the creature gets a save to resist, and another save at the end of each of its turns. (This works on eyes, mouths, nameless sphincters, etc.)Map
R: 0
T: self
D: 0

You get a brief vision of the surrounding rooms in the dungeon. Not the contents--just the topology. The DM reveals [sum] random, adjacent, non-secret rooms that are so far undiscovered. Just draw it on the players' map. If used in a city, it gives an accurate map of the city, with more dice resulting in a higher level of detail.

Portal
R: 20' x [dice]
T: 2 surfaces
D: [dice] rounds

You create a pair of linked portals, each attached to a flat, immobile surface (such as a wall or a floor). Anything that passes through one portal passes out the other, with momentum being conserved. You can create a door beneath a creature, but they get a Dex check to avoid falling into it.

Secret Chest
R: 0
T: self
D: 10 minutes

You can access [dice] extradimensional chests, each one having 3 inventory slots. The chests are ordinal, i.e. you can only access the third chest by investing three casting dice. (You cannot switch chests around).

Secret Room
R: touch
T: wall
D: varies

A touched wall grows an extradimensional room. This takes 30 minutes. Behind the door is an empty 20' x 20' room of matching architecture. The room lasts for 2 hours, doubling in duration for each invested die. At the end of the duration, all objects inside the room are ejected.

Speak with Lock
R: 50'
T: lock
D: [dice] minute

You can talk with locks. Locks tend to be practical and no-nonsense. Trapped locks are liars. Locks remember everyone who ever locked or unlocked them, but their descriptions might not be useful (since they mostly center on descriptions of their hands and personalities-as-expressed-by-turning-a-key). Picking a lock is a terrible sin to them, but it is the only sin. Many believe the form determines function determines morality.

Summon Door Hound
R: 50'
T: conjuration
D: concentration

You summon a houndlike creature that obeys your commands. It has stats as a wolf except that it has HP [sum] and deals +[dice] damage. It can teleport 50' once for every dice invested beyond the second.

Teleport
R: touch
T: objects
D: 0

Up to [sum] touched objects and/or creatures are teleported to a random room within the dungeon. If cast within a building, they are teleported to a random room. If cast within a city, they are teleported to a random building.

It is possible to cast a version of this spell that allows for targeted teleportation, but it requires 10 minutes, a well-known destination, and affects half as many creatures/objects.

Transpose
R: 50'
T: 2 objects
D: 0

Pick two very similar objects. They switch places. Attended/worn/held objects are allowed a Save. DM's discretion as to what counts as 'very similar' but they are encouraged to invent a fail chance for borderline cases.

Wall of Doors
R: 50'
T: conjuration
D: 10 minutes

You create a rectangular wall composed of 10' x 10' panels arranged in a flat plane. You can conjure a total of [dice] panels. You can orient it however you want. It has [sum] HP. You can control who and what can pass through the wall. (For example, a wall of doors could be used as a bridge; allies can run across safely while enemies would fall through suddenly open doors.)